M6400 Raid Drive Failure

Thank goodness for Raid 1. Booted up yesterday and the Intel Matrix screen showed the Seagate 500GB ASG drive at Port 0 failed. I checked with Dell and this is the Master drive that is under the battery.

Of course, since we use Raid 1, the laptop still runs fine and we do have a scheduled backup every day to the pair of 16TB servers in our basement. Tonight I will do another backup to an external drive and then pull the bad drive and drop it in the Thermaltake BlacX on our desktop and test it with Seagate's SeaTools.

The drives are less than a month old, so this is around the time I would expect failures to occur.

I posted this mainly as a warning to you Raid 0 people. Make sure you back up your drives!

 

Good point. I use RAID0, but all the data is automagically copied to my servers whenever I have an active internet connection. I have lost hard disks in laptops in the past, but thankfully with my automagic backups, it is just a matter of sticking in a new drive, restoring an image and letting the "automagic" do its stuff.

Tis worth noting that laptop hard disks last *way* less time than full size hard disks.

 

What is your backup setup and what software do you use?

Thanks

 

The backup software that we use is something that we developed in house. A service runs on the workstation(s) and you configure which directories that you want backing up. A server service runs on one of our servers and changes to the workstation's directories are copied to the server in real time (or as soon as there is a connection to the server).

I think that my company will be selling it when development is finished (i.e. making it look pretty!). There are clients for Pocket PCs and all sorts. I guess it is similar to Windows Live Sync, but without having to go through MS's (or anyone elses!) servers at all.

Here is the product link page.

http://www.hollingside.com/products.shtml

As for the rest of the backup - the servers back themselves up nightly to an 8TB RAID5 array on the network, and then once a week one of the backups is taken off there and stuck in the fire safe.

 

I use Goodsync, works for local drives and network, FTP, SFTP and WebDAV

 

A small update. The drive that the Intel Matrix boot up screen showed as "failed" did not have a physical drive problem. All of the hard drive software tests showed it to be OK and I could read it in the esata dock attached to another computer.

Strangely, when I ran Partition Magic against it, PM showed a partition address error on starting up and asked if it should correct the error. When I returned the corrected disk to the M6400, it automatically rebuilt the raid.

I love it when a system works like it is supposed to!